


The Adventures of Kali Kaition

by Lelelea



Series: Ouroboros Ascendant [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Betrayal, Deception, F/F, F/M, Gen, Hugs Power The Universe, Lies, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, M/M, Mistaken identities, Sorry Not Sorry, Space Opera, War, humans are assholes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-17 22:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14840253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lelelea/pseuds/Lelelea
Summary: When Kali Kaition and her friends fall into another universe three hundred years in the future, this is how they survive.Cadets from the old Earth Space Corps, their base is invaded and destroyed and they build a wormhole to escape. Naturally, there are hijinks.This dimension's Earth has figured out FTL travel and is on the precipice of war with its colonies, and has violated galactic law by giving nuclear weapons and space-faring technology to a new species. Kali Kaition is mistaken for a former ambassador who disappeared fifty years ago while on an interstellar voyage to the Dupmeanto System.There are secret organizations that sway planetary governments and the power of friendship.There are also lies, betrayal and murder.But there's still hope. (And Monster Energy bars. Those things are ubiquitous.)





	1. An Explosion

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta read at all, but better out here than languishing in my HDD, don't you think? 
> 
> There is some salty language, and some hella salty characters. 
> 
> Comments and constructive criticism=good shit. Don't be dickheads-that's Kali's job, not yours.

The waves of the lake lapped at my feet, gentle and warm, as blue as the sky above me, but the wind was on the verge of becoming ferocious, cold enough to make me shiver and pull my jacket closer. My mother stood near the cabin, calling to me. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but it was repetitive, growing louder and louder in volume until it was a shriek and I clapped my hands over my ears…

 

….and awoke. Around me, Base Gamma was on fire. It was hot, oppressive and stifling and I stood clumsily, searching for the door. The explosion had knocked out all but the emergency lights. It was the same outside, the smell of fried wires and charred meat drifting on the smoke. Limping down the corridor, I found the corpse of the soldier on duty. There was a grapefruit sized hole in his chest, his hand still on his service weapon. I took it, and gently closed his wide, frightened eyes. After a moment’s thought. I grabbed his tags as well. Someone was probably waiting for him to come back home.

 

The place was oddly quiet, which meant the fight was already over. I crept down the hallways, jumping at shifting shadows. There were more bodies, all with the same injuries. My fellow cadets had been methodically mowed down in the mess hall, and I wanted to vomit. Instead, my pockets grew heavier with their identification tags. A slowly building rage had begun to replace the fear. 

 

It was probably the fifth or sixth hallway where I found the intern. She had been playing dead, and as soon as I flipped her over, she shot up, trying to weakly grab at my throat. I batted her away easily.

 

“Stop,” I hissed. “They’re going to find us.” I watched her note my uniform and the name tag. 

 

“Oh,” she said, trembling. She was probably in shock. “I-I’m...”

 

“We need to move,” I told her and pressed a gun into her hand, slippery with fear sweat. “Do you know how to shoot things?” 

 

“Not really,” she replied weakly. “But I’ll learn.”

 

“Good,” I clapped a hand on her shoulder and pulled her up. “Let’s go look for more survivors.”

 

It was infinitely more comforting with someone at my back, even if they were inexperienced. We made our way silently down the halls. The smoke was getting thicker by the second. Some subsections were on fire. After watching me collect the tags from the bodies we passed, she started doing the same. That was how the first mercenary saw us, crouching down next to a dead sergeant. 

 

He and I locked eyes, and then the intern proceeded to fire. The first bullet ricocheted off a wall and we both ducked, but the second went through the man’s cheek. He shrieked in pain and I hit him with the butt of my gun. 

“Who sent you?” I growled, shoving the muzzle under his chin. He spat in my face and I hit him again. The urge to cave in his skull was overwhelming.

 

“Who?” I asked. 

 

“Not telling,” he sneered, and it was so easy, to release the safety catch and just pull back the trigger. His head exploded, a mess of blood and brains smearing on the wall behind him and the floor. I grabbed his radio and searched his pockets, finding two wicked looking knives and a notebook. The intern took the flashlight hanging on his belt and his tactical vest. I eyed her.

 

“This is for when I get shot at again,” she explained. I nodded. “Take his boots then, if they fit,” I said.

 

“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked, getting up. “I think that if they’ve secured the place, we can’t get out. This is the only enemy we’ve seen so far, and they’ve probably taken over the surveillance systems.”

 

Her face grew even more pale and she watched me shoulder the machine gun the mercenary had been carrying with a worrying silence. 

 

“There were a lot of explosions at first,” she said at last, fingering her sleeve. “They must have taken out the outer defenses.”

 

I was unable to remember anything from the last few hours before passing out. A concussion seemed likely.

 

“What else?” I asked. “There must have been a lockdown.”

 

“Yeah,” she said. “They still got in.”

 

“Yeah,” I muttered.

 

We went down a staircase in silence, until the radio crackled. I stared at it.

 

“Jennings, why haven’t you checked in yet? We have to leave.”

 

I looked at her and she made a frantic shaking motion with her head. We stood there like terrified rabbits, fearful of even moving.

 

“I’m coming down to you, smug bastard. Reinforcements will be here soon, ETA 18 minutes,” sighed the voice and cut the connection.

 

“They can track us with this,” I said, the beginnings of a plan forming in my head. “Which means we can lure them into a trap.”

 

“No!” she said, her voice echoing down the hall. “We need to leave, and get away as far as possible and tell someone.”

 

She was right, I knew it, but I wanted to kill. The image of the mercenary Jennings, with blood and bone spattered over the ground would be forever burned into my memory, because it had felt good, it had felt right, and I wanted more.

 

“Look,” she said, “you know I work with the wormhole guys, right?”

 

I’d guessed the nature of her research was something like that. “So you want to make a wormhole?”

 

“Yes!” she said. “I think we can have revenge too. The wormhole requires an enormous amount of energy to generate and stabilize. The generators are obviously down, because of the emergency power-”

 

“So we blow up the entire place,” I breathed, “and that will finish them.”

 

She nodded excitedly. 

 

“Can you get us in?” I asked. 

 

“Of course,” she said. “It’s in the basement.” After a moment’s thought, I picked up the radio from the ground and threw it up. It bounced and landed on the staircase above us. 

 

It was difficult, trying to move as quickly as possible through the place. Three levels down, there was another mercenary. I blasted her with the rifle and she fell backwards without making a sound, a smoking hole in her gut. 

 

“Grab the gun,” I said, already hurrying onwards, clambering over the body. Some part of me was disgusted with how easily I had killed another living being, but I shoved it down and away. I could feel Sarah’s eyes-her name tag said Sarah-boring holes into my back, but I was not in the mood to explain my bloodlust to her. 

 

When we were in the basement, she smacked her ID against the reader and the vast vault door slowly opened. 

 

“I don’t know how we’re going to blow up the base unless you want to overload the generators,” I said to her as we ran down the gleaming hallways. 

 

“That’s what we’re doing,” she panted. “I’m not the commander-I don’t have self-destruct codes, I don’t even think this base has a self destruct.”

 

She stopped me and pointed at the tripwire that had been set up at the end of the hall. I motioned for her to flatten herself against the floor and I did the same.

 

“Come out,” I said loudly. It had the intended effect; two people began shooting. I recognized the uniforms. 

 

“Stop!” one of them yelled. I rolled over to look at an unfamiliar cadet holding a gun, pointed at me. My friend Anita stood over Sarah. She helped the other girl up, and the man holstered his gun and did the same, silently noting my name tag. 

 

“Thanks for not killing me,” I said. He smiled and then I knew who he was-Regina Cornwall’s son. She was the vice-President. “Should I salute you?”

 

He laughed. “Please don’t, it’s annoying. That’s a nice big gun you have there.”

 

“I stole it from someone,” I said, turning in time to receive a barrel hug from my best friend. There was a bandage around her head. She pointed at it and the dried blood on my forehead, grinning. “Matching head wounds, I bet.”

 

“You can check later, Sarah’s got a wormhole to make and we’re on a deadline,” I said to them. “This base has been compromised.”

 

“We tried to start it using Dr. Roth’s notes, but couldn’t get the generators to work,” said Cadet Cornwall.

 

“The energy from a controlled demolition of the base should blow it up,” said Sarah. Anita frowned. 

 

“Is that such a good idea?” she asked. “I’m sure we’ve sent out a distress signal and that we have reinforcements arriving.”

 

“In 18 minutes,” I said to her, “that’s what we overheard from the mercenaries. There are a lot of dead people up there and I think we should give them a proper burial, once they’ve dealt with the enemy.”

 

Cornwall had been fiddling with his handheld and it burst to life. We listened to it, nervous. There was no reason to destroy this place if there was help arriving. 

“I’m reading a lot of energy spikes, but no lifesigns other than us,” he commented. “Their communications are encrypted.” They must have found the dead mercenaries and taken the appropriate precautions.

 

“Energy spikes…” I mused, then hefted up my blaster and shot a hole in the wall. It went through it like a hot knife through butter.

 

“That was a huge spike,” he said, “and they’re mostly all clustered around the outside of the base.”

 

“They’re gunning down the cavalry!” said Anita. “How are we supposed to get out of here now?”

 

“Wormhole,” I replied, taking off at a smart pace. “We don’t have a choice. If we wait, they’ll eventually come down here and kill us too. You think they don’t have one of those devices too?”

 

“We’re not the only base that has been hit,” Cornwall was still standing there. He looked at us worriedly. “Theta and Eta have gone dark. The entire web’s talking about it, and us. No information is getting out.” 

 

“Is there any way you could piggyback on the signals from the mercenaries?” Sarah asked. She brought out the radio from her pocket. 

 

“I took this from the woman,” she continued. “I think you could use it to tell them what’s going on.”

 

“If it’s on,” I said, “they can find us.”

 

“Then we can shoot them,” said Anita, patting her gun. “I didn’t manage to get any when I was coming down here.”

 

“I’ll do it,” said Cornwall, grabbing the radio and activating it. When we were in the room, he ran over to a computer and got to work. 

 

“Tell us what to do,” Anita told Sarah. 

 

“The generators are wired together. Find all the green wires, attach them to each other, and knock some of the plates out of alignment,” she said. “Then turn it on. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it should.”

 

“Where is this wormhole going?” I asked her, watching Cornwall talking into the handheld, his voice low and furious.

 

“I don’t know,” she confessed to me. “I know the mechanics of selecting a universe, but we might not be able to come back.”

 

“You don’t know if we can get back?” asked Anita incredulously. She was listening to us, even as she deftly wove wire together and knocked out circuit breakers.

 

Sarah took a deep breath. “If there’s a wormhole to there, there should be one back.”

 

“Let’s take whatever notes we can,” I said. “Tell me how to find the right universe.”

 

She went over to the tables, lighting up the computers as she walked by. 

 

“The only way Dr. Roth thought we could do it was by taking this,” she held up a bag of loose powder, “and immersing your hands in this, something about coding to a particular energy signature and frequency. The drug makes you more receptive to the energy.”

 

“And we funded this?” I was skeptical, but let her drop the bag in my palm. She grimaced.

 

“If it works, it works.” She looked at Anita, who gave her a thumbs-up. She had triggered the mechanism that allowed the generators to drop deep below the surface, where they were usually kept.

 

“Once it blows, we’ll only have a few minutes before the place comes down,” Anita called from across the room. “How’s our transmission going?”

 

“Pretty good,” yelled back Cornwall. “We’ve got several hundred people watching. The mercenaries know where we are, and are trying to blow up the vault door.”

 

Sarah showed me to the tray that connected to a large white terminal, and I poured the powder underneath my tongue. It had an unpleasantly sour aftertaste and was cold in my mouth. I put my hands in the tray, which had a slimy gel layer on the bottom, closing my eyes.

 

“Just focus on where you want to go,” Sarah said. 

 

All at once, it hit. Suddenly, I was aware of every person in that laboratory, of the electricity that flowed through the walls. The generators underneath us glowed with an unearthly light. I knew how the wormhole worked, how I would have to touch and tweak threads of time that ran all over me. I felt Anita’s fear, Cornwall’s hope and Sarah’s joy, because the machine worked.

 

Anita threw the switch and the generators glowed and reached their tipping point. The room went up in flames and I was

 

-flicking through one universe as I had turned pages of a book on a boring autumn day at school-

 

“Kaition you need to focus! She’s going to pass out-” 

 

“The generator’s gone!”

 

-another one was cold and dark, the Earth burned out by the sun but the stars were there-

 

-glittering skyscrapers, a planet of inconceivable light and darkness-

 

-”You need to focus on guarding your face,” said the sergeant in the training room, fist coming up again-

 

-”There’s no such thing as aliens,” she scoffed-

 

-fifteen hundred planets, the brightest minds the Confederacy has to offer, but there’s no place like home-

 

I was lost in space.

 

“I want to find a safe place, a harbor,” I said, my voice a whisper in the void. “I want them to be safe.”

 

The room, the fire that illuminated my friends’ faces seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of paper. There were a million different timelines that had some version or the other of me and the others.

 

“This is us making history,” said Cornwall, and then the door opened and they shot him right after they killed Sarah and Anita, the worst possible outcome again and again and again so I looked until I found one place where we were safe-

 

-everything went impossibly small, we were Alice in Wonderland, the children of gods and monsters, the best possible outcome after the cards lay on the table, a royal fucking flush!

  
  


-and we were gone.

  
  
  



	2. A King And His Pride

I regained consciousness to find myself draped around Anita’s back and let out an undignified snort. She was walking, albeit at a slower pace than the other two. We were in what looked to be a large hallway with gray walls.

 

“Glad you’re awake,” she said, grunting as she stopped me from sliding down. “That drug did a number on you.”

 

“Where are we?” I asked. My limbs felt like jelly. “Are you okay?”

 

“We’re all fine, if a little singed. You deposited us in an alien’s palace, and we’re going to meet the king, or was it queen, I don’t remember...”

 

“Alien palace?” I squeaked, looking around. The place seemed gigantic, full of dim sunlight. I saw nobody else, other than us. Sarah and Cornwall had stopped to look back and she smiled, happy.

 

“I hope you’re feeling better now,” she said. Her dark hair had been plaited and pulled away from her face. “We were all really worried when you passed out.”

 

“Folding spacetime is quite tiring,” I deadpanned.

 

“Kali, if you’re strong enough to snark, you’re strong enough to walk,” said Anita exasperated. She let me slide down and I landed on wobbly legs, grabbing her arm so that I didn’t fall.

 

Cornwall had his hands in his pockets, waiting for us at the end. Two mysterious looking guards stood in front of an ornately carved door. They were vaguely humanoid, but their features covered by a set of startlingly blue armor.

 

“We teleported into the king’s personal chambers,” said Anita dryly. “I think his mistress didn’t appreciate being disturbed.”

 

“You speak alien?” I inquired. Walking seemed to have restored my energy and I already felt much better than I had moments ago

 

“No, they speak English,” she replied. “Well, they’ve been calling it Earth Standard. They seem to be very fond of our movies.”

 

“Glad I could find a universe where we all speak the same language,” I grumbled, straightening out my singed jacket. I looked more closely at the door carvings and the guards eyed me, suspiciously. One of them let his staff crackle, electricity passing up and down its length. Not exactly a subtle threat, now.

 

“The King will see you now,” one of them said imperiously. The doors opened. Someone, a herald perhaps, played a drum while listing out the many titles of this king. The sound rolled across the room, a rich blue carpet leading to the base of a throne that was very, very high up in the air. These aliens had an eye for dramatic decor. A guard prodded me in the back to move forward. "You must bow before you see him."

We walked forward slowly. The prospect of first contact was daunting.

 

"Friends from Earth," boomed the king from above, "we are delighted to have you at the King's Keep." He was a tiny figure in armor the same color as that of the guards, albeit slightly more ceremonial

 

Cornwall nudged Sarah, who poked Anita, who looked at me. All of them had apparently skipped the optional human resources modules back at the academy. Gingerly making my way forward, I bowed deeply. 

 

"Most honored and noble king," I began, for that was what I had heard first when the herald had started to announce the royal, "sovereign of the seventeen realms, we fall upon your mercy."

 

"Mercy," mused the king. "Why do you require my mercy?"

 

"We were tricked," I said, "into coming here. Our enemies built a wormhole and we fell through it, with no idea of how to, uh, get back home." 

I was lying, yes, but also, it felt prudent to not tell a potentially hostile government that we could make holes in spacetime that we could jump through.

 

There were multiple gasps from the walls. We had an invisible audience. Without looking at them, I continued on, hoping that my buddies all had appropriately sad and defeated expressions on their faces.

 

"A wormhole? But my guards found you in my bedroom. What sort of wormhole does this? Explain yourselves," he boomed, quite menacingly and I cringed.

 

"One that was generated by people who wish to see us dead," said Sarah, stepping forward. "We are part of Earth's Space Corps, and we were do not know why we were attacked. They killed all of our personnel and destroyed our home."

She was right, in a way. The base would have been where she lived, as commuting from Earth to space and back again was a very expensive proposition.

 

"I wish to bury my dead friends," I said solemnly. My pockets were still full of dog tags (bless Anita for carrying me and all that metal) and I held up a few from my pocket. "I will never see them again."

 

"Do you wish for revenge?" he asked. A murmur of voices rose from behind the grand columns. Anita shifted uneasily. We had known each other for too long to not have shown our ve

 

"No," I admitted, after a short pause. "I want to grieve. These people, these dead warriors were my family, your majesty. I ate, trained and slept by their sides. Now," I indicated the three behind me, "they are all I have left."

 

"Tell me," he said thoughtfully, armor creaking as he moved, "did this wormhole throw you through time as well?"

 

"I am not sure," I confessed. 

 

"I ask because the Earth Corps of which you speak does not exist anymore." He shifted forward, helmet tilting downwards, watching me closely.

 

The silence grew deafening. Anita touched my shoulder and I clung to the warmth like a lifeline, hoping desperately that this was just a bad dream, but it wasn't. I had made a decision and had brought us here, for better or worse. Everything I knew, everything my little bedraggled group had known was gone. 

 

"I see," I said, wanting to sit down, but there was no chair. "I was not aware of this."

 

The king rose from his throne and clanked down the steps, one at a time, slow but sure. I stared at him mutely, unable to quite process what exactly I had heard. Anita peered at me worriedly but I stared straight ahead at the monarch. When he had finally made his way down, he strode over to us. 

 

"Tonight, you will dine with us. It has been a long time since we have met heroes. I wish to know more about your Earth." He took off his helmet, to reveal a handsome man with graying hair and piercing purple eyes. "As a sign of good faith, we will return your weapons to you."

 

"Thank you," spoke up Cornwall. He had been quiet the whole time, preferring to listen. "You are very generous."

 

"No," replied the king, pinning his gaze upon him. "Merely curious about your world." He returned his gaze to me and I met his eyes squarely, unwilling to back down. 

 

"The guards will take you to your rooms," he said, turning his back on us. Three of them appeared at his side, and sensing his dismissal, I bowed again. They shepherded us out, and as we walked, I wondered numbly if Sarah had told them that I had killed someone, and enjoyed it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
